Chelsea: Conor Gallagher having a near-ideal loan – what’s worth changing?

Conor Gallagher is linked with a midseason reassignment from his loan at Charlton Athletic. Chelsea will have to set the bar high before making such a move.

The loan army has not been capturing many headlines this season. Not only is it at historically low numbers, but you don’t need to follow a half dozen lower-tier English clubs and a few in Europe to keep track of the most promising graduates of the Cobham academy. These days, you can just watch Chelsea’s first team.

Conor Gallagher is one of the exceptions. He attracted plenty of early season attention by scoring three goals in his first five games with Charlton Athletic. The 19-year old is back in the headlines as Chelsea are supposedly going to cancel his loan at Charlton and re-loan him, with a handful of Premier League teams and a few other Championship teams in the mix.

Gallagher is currently getting the single most important thing any 19-year old footballer can get: first-team minutes. That Charlton are currently 19th in the Championship is far less important than Gallagher having 2,220 minutes from 25 starts this season. He has the second-most goals and third-most goals plus assists, as well.

Gallagher would not gain as much from playing less for a better team in the Championship, and perhaps not even as much from being a bit player on a Premier League side.

Norwich City and Burnley are the two Premier League teams in the rumour mix. Chelsea would need to weigh very carefully how much he could expect to play for either of those teams against what they think he would gain from a likely less involved experience.

Would he learn more and develop more quickly by spending more time on the bench in the Premier League than on the pitch in the Championship? Do any of the Premier League clubs interested in him have a manager or style that would particularly suit his long-term accession into Chelsea’s first team? He needed only one game to become a regular starter at Charlton. How long would it take for him to become a regular part of his next club’s rotation, let alone starting XI, coming in midseason?

Reece James and Tammy Abraham spent last season in the Championships with teams that finished 18th and fifth, respectively. Two years before that, Tammy Abraham set a new standard for loanees by scoring 23 goals for Bristol City, who finished 17th. Fikayo Tomori and Mason Mount faced Abraham in last season’s Championship promotion playoff with Derby County. The previous year, Tomori was with Hull City: 18th place on the final day.

The biggest predictor of those players’ success has been how much they played on loan, not how well their loan club did. The Championship as a whole is sufficiently different from the Premier League that playing in the fifth-place team compared to the 18th place team will not better prepare a player for the top flight.

Absent a very strong reason to move him, Chelsea should let Conor Gallagher finish the season at Charlton Athletic.

There is very little risk or cost in keeping him there, and a substantial risk of derailing a nearly ideal loan season by taking him from a struggling team’s starting XI to a higher-placed team’s bench.